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Contribute to the AIYA Blog

About The AIYA Blog

The AIYA website, launched in 2012, is designed to work as a resource for young Australians and Indonesians who are keen to work, study, or travel in each others’ countries. The AIYA Blog in its current form was launched in early 2013, and aims to collect articles, opinion, and commentary from its diverse audience of young Australians and Indonesians on a variety of topics.

There is no shortage of outlets which cover all things related to foreign affairs and politics – but not many concentrate specifically on Indonesia from a youth perspective. That is why we set up the Blog: we feel there aren’t enough outlets for the opinions, stories and experiences of AIYA’s youth audience.

You might have got into a particularly interesting discussion on Twitter, experienced an emotive response to a news article, or just returned from an amazing Indonesia-related experience. We’d like to hear the lot.

Why contribute?

Most of our contributors write for the Blog because they’ve got opinions, experiences, or particular insights they’d like to share. AIYA’s audience is unique in that it is heavily youth-focused and split between both Australia and Indonesia. At the same time, we’ve had success in reaching audiences in government, business, and academia, beyond a ‘typical’ youth focus.

Writing for AIYA will help us reach out to and engage more young people with the Australia-Indonesia relationship. In return, we’re able to offer a platform for your views, as well as a community of thousands of members across our various chapters, social networks and mailing list. As AIYA is a non-profit association primarily supported by the generosity of our partners, we’re not able to offer payment for articles.

For this reason – and due to our emphasis on youth-related affairs – we don’t generally solicit professional academics, journalists, and writers to work with us.

A little about you..

What does an Blog contributor look like? Ideally, you’d be a fairly confident writer with a good grasp of English and/or Indonesian. (But if not, we’re more than happy to work with you on your articles, so please don’t be afraid to approach us!) We particularly encourage article writing done in Indonesian.

Because AIYA is a youth-focused organisation, you’d ideally be a student or a young professional, probably in their 20s – but we don’t focus on a particular age group. Once again, we’re always open to ideas and suggestions.

You don’t have to be studying for an Indonesian major, or international relations, or anything in particular. AIYA is an organisation for students and graduates from all backgrounds – which means we’re open to topics ranging from science, to foreign affairs, to business, to the arts.

The main emphasis here is on posting articles that are interestingand relevantfor a bilateral audience.

Writing style

We aim for a conversational style – nothing too formal, but composed and clear. In general, we’d suggest to write as if you’re speaking – just be clearand straightforward. The AIYA Blog is aimed at our own members, most of all, so imagine you’re talking to your friends. In practical terms, this means using the first person and embracing contractions (e.g. it’s, you’re, we’ll).

And don’t forget, it is a blog – so feel free to link away in your posts, or embed a video. (There’s no need for footnotes or reference lists!)

We’re always keen to start a discussion around different issues – so if you can pose a question, or get people talking, that’s what we’re after. That doesn’t mean writing a rant or a polemic – AIYA isn’t a political organisation – but if you’ve got an argument to share, we’d like to hear it.

Articles on the AIYA blog should provide new or interesting perspectives on the relationship. If your post is a useful and relevant enough resource, we might even spin it off to a permanent page on our website.

I don’t think I could write a whole article!

If you don’t have the time, the means, or the confidence to write a full article – but you’ve still got an interesting idea – feel free to get in touch anyway. We’re all ears, and we might just be able to give the idea the resources or the background information it needs.

Once we’ve discussed your topic, and your article is ready to submit, we’ll check it over for style, formatting and layout. AIYA generally publishes at most two articles per week, which means your article may not be scheduled to appear immediately.

There are plenty of other ways to contribute, too – you could comment on our posts, talk to us on Twitter, or even share links from our weekly email round-up, AIYA Links.

A note on copyright and attribution

It goes without saying that we expect all submissions to be written by you – plagiarism reflects poorly on us, and looks even worse for you. On the internet, it’s not even worth trying. As above, we don’t expect a full list of references, but if you’re relying on a particular source to support an argument or assertion, then you should refer to it with a link or quick mention.

As a rule, contributions to the AIYA Blog should be substantially unique. It’s not a problem if you’ve written articles on a similar topic for other outlets, but we won’t generally accept work which has already appeared elsewhere. By submitting your work to us, you’re indicating your approval for us to publish the piece on our website and promote it on social media like Facebook and Twitter, as well as in AIYA Links.

With your approval (and help), we might try to place the article, or a summary of it, on another website (with attribution to you, and to the AIYA Blog) to help find it a wider audience.

If any of these requirements or conditions are cause for concern, just let us know and we can discuss it directly.

The next step

If you have an idea for a post, feel free to contact the AIYA Blog Editors, Laura Porter-Jacobs and Lachlan Haycock, at blog@aiya.org.au. Pitch your idea and we can get the ball rolling. We look forward to your ideas!